Shatterpoint
by SweetSinger2010
Summary: She slips into unconsciousness. Castle the novelist hopes it's a swoon brought on by his confession of love. Castle the realist has to acknowledge a terrible reality: Kate Beckett is dying, right there, in his arms.
1. Fear

Author's Note: Here's my first Castle fic! It's a tag to "Knockout," of course. It's a short multi-chap chronicling the moments before and after Beckett's shooting from three different points of view. The first installment will be shorter than the others, I think, given Alexis' minimal involvement in the story at this point. Read and enjoy!

Shatterpoint

_Alexis_

It's a fear Alexis hasn't felt since Dad hinted at a bomb threat in the city—the same kind of cold, sick, panicky fear that vaults your heart into your throat when you mash the brakes and the car doesn't slow down.

Alexis doesn't miss the way her dad locks eyes with Detective Beckett as she turns to him during a brief pause in the eulogy. She also doesn't miss the slight movement of his eyes as his gaze shifts away from the lovely, imposing woman. His brow furrows. But why? Eight seconds later, she has her answer.

She blinked—that's how fast it happened—she blinked and then she saw him falling.

Alexis Castle is the daughter of a best-selling novelist, not a cop. She has never feared for her father's life. His dignity and maturity, maybe. But never, ever his life. He'd had plenty of close calls, she knew, in the last couple of years. Until now, things like gun-fights, radiation poisoning, brawls and freezers seemed like things straight from another one of his _Storm_ novels. Until now, her father had seemed immortal.

Alexis will never be able to tell what happened first. Was it her dad's shout, the shot, and him running forward? Or was it his shout, running, and then the shot?

Or maybe they happened simultaneously. This is the only thing Alexis knows for sure: she heard the shot, and the last thing she saw before she wound up with her face in the grass was her father falling, Beckett in his arms.

Terrible seconds pass before Alexis dares to raise her head. Somebody just got shot. Was it him? Is he…dead? She asks herself a question, a question he had often mulled over and over. _What will I do without him?_

Chaos has ensued, but it provides Alexis with clarity.

"Beckett down! Beckett down!"

She finally sees him, bent low over Kate's still body. It's a century before the ambulance comes, but he stays there until the paramedics begin to poke and prod her clinically, concernedly.

Alexis doesn't need to ask her father if Detective Beckett is bad off. She can feel the answer in his too-tight embrace. He's aged about twenty years in two minutes, and his jaw is set hard. There's blood on his hands and his shirt.

As the ambulance shrieks its way to the hospital, Alexis knows that more than one life hangs in the balance. Cold fear once again grips her when she thinks about the way her father clung desperately to the fast-fading Beckett's limp hand.

"Gram," Alexis begins to cry as she turns to Martha, who's been stunned into silence. "What's going to happen? What if she dies?"

"I—I don't know, sweetheart." The older woman responds faintly, voice cracking.

Holding tightly to each other, they refuse to acknowledge a terrible reality: Kate Beckett may already be dead.

Truly her father's daughter, Alexis begins to analyze the situation with a writer's mind. She stubbornly clings to the hope that this is all just a terrible, terrible dream. It has to be, if for no other reason than that everything is all wrong.

A real-life heroine's life is robbed by an assassin's bullet? After everything else that happened, her life ends just like that?

Alexis can't believe it. The story just doesn't work.


	2. Agony

Author's Note: So um, writing Castle himself was much more difficult than I anticipated and the length of this chapter ran away with me. I gladly welcome any critiques that'll help me improve! And I realized as I was uploading the last time that I forgot to disclaim. Weeeelll, I don't own anything of Castle. Too bad, huh? Haha. Read and enjoy!

Shatterpoint

_Castle_

The story doesn't work.

Montgomery dies protecting Kate, taking Lockwood with him, and that's supposed to end the whole mess? All that noise about the assassination plot coming from someone with juice, and Beckett is still untouched?

Nope.

It doesn't sit well. Not for an instant.

The story just _doesn't_ _work_, and Rick Castle can't get over it. He feels like loose ends have been deceptively tied, like there's something somewhere that got overlooked in the aftermath of the Captain's death. Mostly, he just feels like something (else) bad is going to happen.

As they bear Roy Montgomery's body to its final resting place, Castle looks at Beckett from behind. The sun highlights rich tints of gold in her hair. Her posture is tall and stately, her step strong.

She's alive.

Castle grinds his teeth to fight a sinking feeling again.

If nothing else, the last three years spent trailing a team of detectives have taught him that the good die senselessly. Always. They're punished for things that happen beyond the realm of their control, silenced to clean up messes they didn't make, penalized for knowing too much or too little. Castle believes that there's a frighteningly thin line between living a vibrant life and not living one at all. It _does_ end, just like that.

As Beckett gives the eulogy, Castle's standing just off to the side. The soothing lift and lilt of her voice is a pleasant hum in the background of his troubled thoughts; he hardly hears a word of what she says until he's vaguely aware that something monumentally important has just left her mouth.

"And if you're very lucky, you find someone willing to stand with you."

She pauses now and turns to him—to _him_—and holds his gaze. In her eyes he reads an apology, an acknowledgement, a thank-you, a promise. And a glimmer of something that Richard Castle dares to call _hope_—hope for them.

As Kate continues her speech, it's a glimmer of something else that catches his eye.

The first time, he thinks it's an optical illusion. _What_ is there in a distant field of tombstones that could possibly glint in the sun like that?

The second time, old research done on long-range weapons flashes in his mind's eye.

_Oh._

He doesn't wait to see it a third time; he's already moving.

"_Kate!_"

The time elapsed between his warning shout and his crashing into her is measured by a single gunshot. A second.

That's the difference between Castle wondering if he and Kate can make it work together and wondering if the last breath was her last. Things changed, just like that.

As he scrambles up to hover over her, he prays he's wrong, but bullet holes don't lie. And there's a considerable one in her abdomen. Her pristine white glove—the one on the hand she's desperately trying to raise to him—is stained scarlet.

Castle's breath hitches and his chest constricts, but he forces himself to quell the rising fear and panic in his heart so that he can quell the fear and panic rising in hers.

His voice almost doesn't work. "It's okay. Shh."

He's holding her now, cupping the back of her head, pressing her waist gently. She's fighting for every breath, and the tortured look in her eyes—it's almost manic—seems tantamount to a resignation.

"Kate, please."

Their gazes lock and her left hand grips his wrist.

_Good._ Castle's thoughts are frantic. _She's holding on. She needs to stay grounded._ His heart is hammering a sickening beat. _She needs to—_

"Stay with me, Kate."

The way her eyes are searching, burning into his, Castle's not sure she can hear him. Her breaths are coming more rapid and shallow. He has to try _harder_.

"Don't leave me. Please."

His voice breaks because he knows she's slipping. He can feel it. And he can see it in the tears trailing across her temples. The hazel orbs are fast losing their sharp focus.

"Stay with me, okay?"

He prays for a response this time, but her body begins to relax.

"Kate."

Her eyes flick to his once more, and he can feel the effort it takes for her to keep them there.

"I love you."

He whispers, but the way her eyebrows twinge tells him that she _does_ hear.

"I love you, Kate."

She slips into unconsciousness then. Castle the novelist hopes it's a swoon brought on by his confession. Castle the realist has to acknowledge a terrible reality: Kate Beckett is dying, right there, in his arms.

For the next awful moments, the only sounds that Castle can hear are the sounds of his own ragged breathing as he tries to determine whether she's alive or, or—not.

By the time the paramedics arrive, she's mostly not.

The doctors at the hospital banish him from the emergency room when things start to get complicated. He half-complies, positioning himself at the nearby nurses' station. He tries not to think about how Beckett's face had drained of life-color until it matched the sterile gurney sheet.

It's an agony he's felt only once before, almost fifteen years ago. The worst few minutes of his life had been spent pulling his four-year-old from the depths of a motel pool, cradling her on the hot concrete siding, weighting compressions on her little chest as her lips turned bluer and bluer before she finally began to choke up water and breathe again.

In the ambulance, Beckett had begun to choke up blood. Alexis bounced back from her ordeal; Kate may not.

In the E.R., she hits rock-bottom. Castle can't see, but he can hear the two doctors give frantic orders, he can hear the monitors squeal as she flat-lines. Somebody triggers the Code Blue alarm.

_Detective Beckett has no pulse, she's not breathing_, a nurse comes to him and says. _With the extent of internal damage…_ In the background, a defibrillator hums to life. The sound of its electric jolt rattles Castle's heart into an arrhythmia. Is it rattling hers, too, like it's supposed to? _We're doing everything we can, but—_

But.

The nurse leaves, and he slides down against a wall, staring vacantly at the flimsy cloth partition separating him from Kate. This can't be happening. This _can't_ be happening. Not to her, not now. Not ever.

The fight for the detective's life continues, but Castle hears a nurse suggest hesitantly, "Maybe we should call it…?"

No, they're gonna try one more time, the doctor says. Castle holds his breath in sick anticipation.

He's no stranger to death. He's written about it, studied it, investigated it. But death was a stranger to him. Until now.

The defibrillator is primed, he can hear it. _One, two, three, clear! _

He feels all motion cease, and he can count his heartbeats in this awful pause. Waiting to hear her pulse register on the monitor again. He thinks about something she said to him, months ago as they stood together over cursed Raglan's body.

_It's different when it happens right in front of you, close enough to watch the lights go out. _

Yeah. He agreed with her then, and he agrees with her now more than ever. Now he understands the need for vengeance, justice, understanding, a reason _why_, that's been driving her career.

Yeah, it's different.


End file.
